What are good brands?
What are good brands?
Hi, we’re Good Brands Creative. We love good brands so much, it’s what we named our company. Because we want to help our clients become good brands — the best version of themselves they can be. So what exactly are good brands? How do organizations become a good brand? And, by contrast, what’s a bad brand? Let’s dive in.
What’s your brand?
First off, we need to be clear: a brand is the aggregate of all of the experiences an organization creates. It’s not just your logo, your name, your advertising. It’s who you are, what you do, why it matters, and what it’s like for people who interact with your brand. Those people who experience and interact with your brand — predominately your customers or clients, but also your team and partners — their psychological, emotional, and transactional experience IS your brand.
Sound ephemeral? Let’s break it down. Let’s say you’re a company bottling fresh, pure air to sell. Your logo and advertising are all about how fresh and life-giving your bottled air is. Imagine lots of blues, whites, and greys, maybe a nice slim san serif font, advertising showing people breathing your air in brightly lit rooms with happy faces. GREAT! Is that your brand?
Well, let’s say that bottling and selling air is a bit of a scam. After all, it is air. Customers aren’t thrilled with the value they’re getting. Your ads promised a lot of health, smiles, and happiness but people aren’t really feeling any of those benefits. You claim it’s the purest mountain air from the fjords of Norway, but honestly? It’s hard to tell the difference between that and bottled Manhattan air (sorry, NYC). Customer service calls lead to frustration, because how do you prove it’s fjord air? And why don’t they feel better? And then a PR crisis breaks. Turns out some of your air is from – gulp – Los Angeles (sorry LA!). Guess what your brand is? Is it Pure-Norwegian-fjord-fresh–all-the-health-benefits-complete-happy-life? Nope. It’s LA-smog-air-broken-promises-hard-to-prove-maybe-it-works-maybe-not. You get the idea. You can say you’re a good brand, but it’s what you do that counts.
Good brands
Good brands can do a lot of amazing things. They tell beautiful stories. They make a promise to their customers and they always keep it. They have a great team culture. They have a greater purpose and mission. They build a community united around a common interest or way of seeing the world.
We break all of this down into three simple categories:
Good brands know their audiences.
Good brands have something worthwhile to offer the world.
Good brands tell good stories.
We’ll expand on those and explain how you can achieve each of these to be a good brand. And yes, things like having a great internal culture (#2) or making a promise to their customers and keeping it (#3) fall into these broader categories.
No. 1: Good brands know their audiences
A good brand knows its audiences so it can reach them in the right place and the right way, understand their experience with the brand, and offer something that makes a difference in their lives.
Knowing audiences means having a strong understanding of both who the audience is and what their experience is with the brand. It’s knowing “what” they are, like their age range, gender breakdown, locations/markets, income, education, etc. It also delves into who they are, what they do, and what they experience: their psychology, emotions, needs, wants, behaviors, and priorities. What do they aspire to in life? How do they see themselves? How do they want to see themselves, and how do they want to be seen by others? These deeper questions, guided by empathy as much as data, help good brands understand their audiences.
A good brand also understands how its product or service fits into their audiences’ lives. Maybe your brand helps them become a better parent, or a healthier person, or express themselves. In B2B, maybe it helps them feel more secure, or collaborate better, or further progress towards their mission. But understanding the deeper offering behind your product or service is crucial to understanding your audience and being a good brand. A good brand understands why their audience cares about their brand: why they choose it, what impact it has, what problems it solves, what they want and expect.
This foundation helps brands reach the right audiences in the right way. It helps align your audiences’ expectations with the experience of the brand (which is going to go a long way in creating brand trust, loyalty, and resilience). It helps not waste your audiences’ time by speaking to the wrong value proposition, or focusing on the wrong message.
Good brands also know where their audiences are. Where they spend their time, what channels, influencers, devices, events, and voices will reach them, and their mindset in these spaces. This lets the brand show up in the right way, in the right space, at the right time.
No. 2: Good brands have something of value to offer the world
Good brands also have something of value to offer to the world, and a deep understanding of this value. That means a good product or services that will impact their audiences. This is where brand positioning comes in: what you do, who you do it for, why it matters, how it’s different, and what the outcome (benefit) is.
Having a strong understanding of the value proposition of your product or service can help you bring it to the world more effectively. This means knowing the tangible and intangible benefits of your offering, whether it varies by person or group, and clearly communicating those benefits to your audiences.
Good brands also have a purpose, or a reason that they exist and a thing they exist to do. Even if the product or service you offer is your purpose, having that be a strong guiding purpose means you’ll create the best version of that offering. And you can also build a good community and experience around that offering, giving people a sense of purpose as they join you.
A purpose or mission can be focused on making the world a better place, even if it’s not connected to solving widespread crises or meeting needs. Sometimes making the world a better place could just mean creating a good place to work, a good product or service, and a good experience interacting with the brand.
No. 3: Good brands tell good stories
Stories and experiences create the reality of your brand: it's where you move beyond intention and strategy and actually engage with your audiences and create an image of your brand in their minds. Doing this well — telling good stories and creating good experiences — is the natural outcome of knowing your audiences and having something of value to offer the world.
Telling good stories is about the execution as much as the narrative. It means reaching the right audiences with the right message at the right time. It means being consistent and focused. And it means being authentic and truthful to who you are as a brand.
The craft of a good story is important for being a good brand. That means having a clear intention and well-crafted strategy behind the story or experience. It means executing it well, with design, narrative, and experience. Whether that’s a simple graphic or print piece, a longer form video, or an event or campaign, do it well from start to finish. Don’t waste our time and don’t put something out there that’s confusing, pointless, or messy.
This is even more important with the rise of artificial intelligence and AI-generated ads. It’s easier than ever to create content, but it’s just as hard to create good content. An expedited production process doesn’t mean anything if there’s not a good story and strategy behind the idea. As mid-content proliferates, consumers will turn off to the volume and it will be harder than ever to break through and reach audiences: the answer won’t be getting more noise in front of them, but telling something compelling that they want to watch rather than skip, that they remember rather than forget, and that they actually want to consume.
Bad brands
Some bad brands are obvious, but we’ll focus here on bad brands that are trying but miss the mark. Bad brands may think they know their audiences, tell good stories, and have something of value to offer the world, but they fall short.
Bad brands waste our time, speak to the wrong people, say things we don’t care about, break their promises, and don’t stand out. They’re inconsistent, inauthentic, and unclear.
They may lack an accurate understanding of their target audiences, or may focus on the completely wrong audiences. Their knowledge may be surface-level, outdated, or incomplete. A gap in knowledge anywhere in the audience strategy could point their tactics in the wrong direction completely.
They may have a poor quality product or service, but our focus — on bad brands that can become good — may be better spent on brands that don’t fully grasp the value of their offering, and/or fail to communicate it effectively. They may be trying to communicate their value proposition without differentiating it from competitors — make a buyer’s choice even harder. And they may be, through their actions, not bringing value to the world beyond just their product or service: maybe their company culture is failing, their customer experience is lacking, their vision for the future is uninspired. Where they can make a positive impact on the world, they’re failing to live up to their potential.
Becoming a Good Brand
So how do you become a good brand? Well, the first step is listening. Really, really listening. Not just doing a social audit or audience survey. But going deep with an intensive audience research initiative. Quantitative research is important, but qualitative is equally if not more important here. You want to really dig into what people think and feel about your brand. What are their expectations? What do they care about? How do you fit into their lives, their sense of self, their identity as part of a community? How can you inspire them? How can you be a part of something bigger than just what you sell? Interviews, focus groups, workshops, and even third-party studies are going to be your tools for this.
Next, you need to get your house in order. From the top to bottom, from your senior leaders to the front lines with your customers, you need to experience a conversation and journey about who your brand is, why it exists, what you do (not just literally, but in a deeper sense), and what you can create together. If everyone participates, everyone has a chance to be more on board. You’ll need to really identify and develop an action plan for the experiences you want to create: psychologically, emotionally, physically, and practically. And then ensure everyone is bought in, with a direct and tactical connection to what they do every day.
This isn’t just a marketing or communications exercise. Your brand should also guide your customer service, internal culture, product/service strategy, hiring and onboarding, ESG/CSR initiatives, and more. You’ll find that, when you find your why and align everything to it, your brand is driving your organization to become more sustainable, competitive, differentiated, valued, and preferred.
